Emulex 16Gb Fibre Channel HBAs Aimed at Cloud, Virtualization

Emulex in December will begin shipping
what officials say are the fastest Fibre Channel host bus adapters in the world
and designed specifically with virtualization and cloud computing in mind.

The company's LightPulse 16Gb Fibre
Channel HBAs will deliver more than 1 million I/O per second (IOPS) over a
single port, which officials said is crucial to enabling high-performance
interconnect capabilities in cloud computing environments and virtualized data
centers.

The LightPulse HBAs-the single-channel
LPe16000 and dual-channel LPe16002-were announced at the Storage Networking World show
Oct. 10 in Orlando, Fla., and already are sampling with some OEMs, according to
Shaun Walsh, vice president of market at Emulex.

The capabilities in the new LightPulse
HBAs show Emulex as a company "that really understands the difference between
the physical environment and the virtual environment, and one that really
understands what is going on in the cloud," Walsh said in an interview with eWEEK.

The HBAs are based on the Emulex Engine
XE201 I/O Controller, a quad-port converged fabric controller that not only
supports up to 16Gb Fibre Channel but also 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 40GbE
converged fabrics.

Fibre Channel currently is the top
interconnect technology in the storage space and, according to market research
firm Lightcounting, will continue to be so for the next several years. Eventually,
however, 10GbE iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) will eat into that
dominance, though Fibre Channel will continue to be the leading storage
interconnect through the end of the decade, as it migrates to 16Gb and then
32Gb, Lightcounting analysts said in a report last
month.

Emulex rival QLogic also is pushing
deeper into the converged fabric area, announcing in September an expansion of
its Adaptive Convergence strategy with new adapters, switches and routers that
can power 16Gb Fibre Channel or 10GbE converged networks from the same
hardware.

Emulex's Walsh said the company's new
HBAs are more than addressing the next step in speed. New features enable them
to support cloud and virtualization environments. One of those features is
vScale, which lets administrators pool resources that can then be dynamically
allocated to multiple protocols.

In addition, vPath will support
emerging interconnect virtualization standards, while Emulex's GreenState power
management capabilities allow for selective dynamic hibernation, turning off
ports when they're not needed, Walsh said. Emulex's vEngine offers performance
improvements by offloading some workloads from the hardware.

According to Emulex, the LPe16000
adapters offer more than five times the IOPS and twice the data throughput of 8
Gigabit Fibre Channel adapters. The company's OneCommand Vision product
monitors the environment.